The tendency to produce more men often takes the society to the brink, to the threshold point. At this point of brink people must die, either through famine or through war. Famines do not represent a crisis but a regular routine phenomenon. Because there is a limit on possible production, but not on population grown, agrarian societies soon reach a point at which their populations cannot be supported by food production.

In such situations famines restore the population production equilibrium. 

Agrarian societies are Malthusian (Malthus was a famous century demographer who linked the trends in population to the available ‘production limit’). The capacity of population growth is constrained by production and vice-versa. As a result, even though agrarian society produces more people, population remains stable and does not increase very significantly through the centuries. It moves in a circle and never exceeds the threshold. There is a strong connection between population and production in the agrarian society.